Did 1995 Change Everything?

newyorker.com

20 points·jfaat··7 comments

Some people might think "we need the Clintons back in the White House to get back to the go-go times in the 90's." This article is very subtly dispelling that idea.

This book review didn't interest me in the book in the least. Most of the issues considered pivotal are best forgotten, and the reviewer offers little praise.

Tangentially, the author of the review, Louis Menand, is certainly qualified to review history. I highly recommend his book The Metaphysical Club about the origins of American Pragmatism.

That's not the New Yorker's article title.

It's their HTML doc title.

Needlessly snide:

> Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity Is Finally Over” was the headline in the Onion the month George W. Bush took office, January, 2001. His Administration took care of that in a hurry.

One might remember that it was Al Qaeda, not Bush's administration, which attacked the United States, and that Osama bin Laden declared war on the U.S. back during the Clinton years, in 1996.

* restrains self from engaging in futile debate with perceived crazy right winger

Stabs like this at the Bush administration make it hard for me to take the rest of the article seriously. To assert that the Bush administration is to blame for the credit crisis is laughable, assuming that's what the author meant by the end of prosperity. It was decades of poor economic policy that reached a critical point. I don't particularly love Bush, but jokes about him are cliché

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